Marrying the Bratva King (Forbidden Kings #11)

1. Nina

NINA

My mother has been straightening the same crease in her dress for four minutes.

I know because I’ve been watching her do it, sitting beside her in the front row of a church that smells like old wood and too many white roses, and I’ve decided that the crease is not the problem.

I have been home for eleven hours.

Ten years across four cities and one very small Manhattan apartment, and eleven hours back in New York, and I’m already in a church, in a dress I would not have chosen, watching the clock on the wall as if it owes me something.

This is what I came back for. Four days, a return flight booked for Monday, and this.

We had twenty minutes alone before this, upstairs in Sofiya’s old bedroom with the door closed.

She didn’t need to tell me much because she never does.

I know about Alexei. I have known about Alexei for two years through late-night calls, carefully worded texts, and one photo she sent me in February that she asked me to delete immediately.

I know what his name sounds like when she says it, thinking no one important is listening.

She told me she had run out of ways to say no that anyone in this family would hear.

She said it the way she says things she has already made peace with, flat and quiet, not asking me to fix it.

I told her to run anyway because that’s what I always say, because running is the only solution I have ever trusted.

She looked at me the way she looks at me when I have forgotten, again, that not everyone has somewhere to run to.

Our father’s debt to the Vasin family is substantial. I’ve seen enough of his books to know the shape of it. This wedding, this room, this moment, is the repayment plan. Sofiya knows it. I know it. The only difference between us is that she’s the one in the wedding dress.

I held her hand for a moment before we came downstairs.

Neither of us said anything. There was nothing to say that the hand-holding didn’t already cover, and we have always understood each other better in the quiet than in the noise.

She squeezed once and let go, and I watched her face go from real to ready in the time it takes to blink, that thing she learned from our mother that I never could, and then we walked downstairs together, and I took my seat, and she went to wait for our father.

Now I’m here, and she is not yet, and I’m looking at this room.

The Vasin side is fuller than ours. Twelve people to our left, maybe more, and none of them looks like they came here to celebrate.

They look like they came here to witness.

There is a difference, and I’ve spent enough years in rooms where the difference mattered to read it immediately.

They are still and watchful in a way that has nothing to do with the solemnity of a church, and one man near the end of the row has been looking at the entrance since before I sat down, not with anticipation but with the focused patience of someone running a perimeter check.

Our side is smaller. My mother’s sister and her husband.

Two of my father’s business associates with their wives, both of whom look like they would rather be anywhere else and are too polite to show it properly.

A handful of people I half recognize from a life I have not been living for a decade.

Everyone is dressed well enough for the occasion, and not one person in this room looks like they believe in it.

I look toward the altar.

Nikolai Vasin is not what his press coverage suggested.

I researched him the way I research everyone: business filings, public records, and the two profiles written about him in the last five years, which said a great deal about his portfolio and very little about the man.

I was expecting someone who looked like his net worth.

Controlled, polished, the blankness of men who have spent decades making sure nothing shows on their faces.

He does not look blank.

He is older, silver-haired, broad in a way that suggests it was never manufactured, with the kind of face that gets more interesting as it ages, and looks like it knows that.

Dark suit, no tie, and I can see ink at his collar and his wrists, tattoos that the business profiles didn’t mention and that I file away automatically because that’s what I do with things that do not add up.

He should be watching the entrance.

He’s watching me.

Not a glance. Not the brief eye contact that happens when you look around a room and land somewhere by accident. He’s looking directly at me with the focused stillness of a man who found what he was looking for and has stopped moving.

I hold it for a second and then look away because I’m not going to have a staring contest with my sister’s groom at his own wedding, and also because the quality of that look makes the back of my neck feel strange in a way I don’t have a clean word for.

My mother touches the crease again.

The doors open. Sofiya walks in on our father’s arm, and she is composed and beautiful, and I’m the only person in this room who knows exactly what that composure is costing her.

The pianist plays. The room shifts in that collective way rooms do when the person everyone has been waiting for finally arrives.

I look back toward the altar because I can’t help it, and Nikolai Vasin is still looking at me.

Then he turns his head and says something to the priest beside him, low enough that I can’t hear it, and the priest’s expression does something I have never seen a priest’s expression do before. The red starts at his collar and moves up.

The pianist stops.

Not a natural stop. A stop that happens in the middle of a note, which means someone told him to, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing I have heard all day.

Sofiya stops walking.

My father stops walking.

My mother’s hand goes still in her lap.

Nikolai Vasin straightens, and his voice carries the full length of the room without any apparent effort, the kind of voice that has never once needed to raise itself to be heard.

“I won’t be marrying the younger one.”

Nobody breathes.

“I’ll be marrying the older one.”

Every person in this room turns to look at me at the same time.

My mother makes a sound beside me that is not quite a word.

My sister is standing in the middle of the aisle in a wedding dress, holding flowers she’s not going to need, and my father’s face has gone through three different expressions in under two seconds, and the priest is still that alarming shade of red.

Nikolai Vasin has not looked away from me once.

My return flight is on Monday. I have a piece due to my editor by Tuesday. I have a life in a city that is not this one, built carefully over ten years, and I’m sitting in the front row of a church in New York watching a man I’ve never spoken to rearrange all of it without asking.

Nobody in this room is waiting for my answer.

That’s the part that should concern me most, and somehow, absurdly, it doesn’t even make the top three.